encounter

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encounter

[en′kau̇n·tər]

(physical chemistry)

A group of collisions, each of which consists of two molecules that collide without reacting and do not separate immediately because of the cage of surrounding molecules.

encounter

any meeting between two or more people in a face-to-face interaction. Everyday life is made up of a series of such interactions, some of them with persons we know well, but many others with people with whom we may have only a fleeting contact. Described by GOFFMAN (1961b,1967,1971) as situations of copresence, encounters involve SOCIAL ACTORS in ‘positionings’ of the body and knowledgeable attention to FACE WORK, creating and preserving the numerous, distinctive kinds of encounter that can be observed. See also FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION, INTERACTION ORDER AND INTERACTION RITUAL.

References in classic literature ?

On foot or horseback, with spear, with axe, or with sword, I am alike ready to encounter thee.

He then commanded his trumpet to sound a defiance to the challengers, and desired a herald to announce to them, that he should make no election, but was willing to encounter them in the order in which they pleased to advance against him.

uf, who lost a stirrup in the encounter, was adjudged to have the disadvantage.

In the stranger's third encounter with Sir Philip Malvoisin, he was equally successful; striking that baron so forcibly on the casque, that the laces of the helmet broke, and Malvoisin, only saved from falling by being unhelmeted, was declared vanquished like his companions.

De Grantmesnil's horse, which was young and violent, reared and plunged in the course of the career so as to disturb the rider's aim, and the stranger, declining to take the advantage which this accident afforded him, raised his lance, and passing his antagonist without touching him, wheeled his horse and rode back again to his own end of the lists, offering his antagonist, by a herald, the chance of a second encounter.

He chose a new and a tough spear, lest the wood of the former might have been strained in the previous encounters he had sustained.

View in context

Does an encounter happen at the wish and command of a chief minister or the state's police?

From 'Encounter Raj' To 'Ram Rajya' In UP

To better understand how the ACA and Medicaid expansion might affect an academic hospitalist practice located in Colorado, which expanded Medicaid in January 2014, we evaluated if payer mix and physician reimbursement by encounter changed between 2013 and 2014.

Changes in payer mix and physician reimbursement after the affordable care act and medicaid expansion

In this research, we examine the relative impact of the human encounter and the technological encounter on consumers' overall satisfaction.

Tellers versus technology in overall consumer satisfaction with banking services

However, stopping at that point will dilute the meaning of this encounter and miss a significant training principle: the perceptions and assumptions of the offender and the officer and how they affected the outcome of the situation.

The deadly mix: officers, offenders, and the circumstances that bring them together

Maria Hohn provides a fascinating study of the encounter between Germans and the American military in the rural West German state of the Rhineland-Palatinate during the 1950s.